Evaluation of Brazilian national system of haemovigilance (NSH)

The haemovigilance is a system of evaluation and alert, to collect and to evaluate informations of post transfusional adverse events and prevent new cases. Brazil has an haemovigilance system since 2002, with restricted number of hospitals as notifiers.
This work describes the National System of Haemovigilance (NSH), presenting a descriptive statistics and the representativeness and acceptability, analyzes the notifications between 2002 - 2005 and proposes recommendations to make the system better. 
To achieve these goals, the Guidelines for Evaluating Public Health Surveillance Systems (CDC) was used. EpiInfo 6.04d was used to analyze the data base.
The SNH has a regular geographically representative and present low acceptability. On the other hand, data quality and opportunity were considered very good. On a total of 3,237 received notifications, 73% were confirmed. Between these, 99% were immediate reaction. 97% of the reactions were classified in “no risk to life reactions”. Between the reactions with immediate risk to life, 28% were severe allergic reaction and 25% were bacterial contamination. Red cells were responsible for 59% of reactions.
In general, Brazilian SNH data is similar to French haemovigilance data on types of involved haemocomponents and types of reactions. We propose to simplify the form of notification and to increase the number of notifiers hospitals to improve the representativeness of the system. Some recommendations were adopted by the National Health Surveillance Agency.